Excerpts from A rare trip home rouses Rabble memories for John Pimm by Bernard Perusse for The Gazette.
The Rabble and the Haunted were Montreal’s two coolest anglo bands in the second half of the 1960s. If the Haunted were closer to the raw, blues-based sound and bad-boy image of the Yardbirds or the early Rolling Stones, the Rabble were farther out in terms of both music and look. They were, more or less, our answer to Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention. Oddly enough, though, frontman Pimm and lead guitarist Mike Harris wrote some of the catchiest hooks this side of the Beatles.
[...] “A lot of the stuff that happened here was encapsulated here,” Pimm said. “We heard about the Staccatos from Ottawa and the Ugly Ducklings from Toronto, but they never heard of us. It just didn’t work both ways. Even so, Quebec was a neat place to be. The audiences were great and they welcomed original stuff. They were excited about the music. But you were kind of trapped in Quebec unless you really started to travel around and get promoted somewhere else. A lot of memories stayed in Quebec. Good memories. A lot of great bands came out of here, but it just didn’t really have a chance somehow.
“Part of it may be that English Canada wasn’t that interested in this province,” Pimm continued. “Maybe they were a little lost about the two languages going on.” Although the Rabble recorded in English, he pointed out, much of the group’s audience was francophone.
[...] “Way before the Rabble, I wanted to be a professional musician. I didn’t give a damn about stardom or notoriety or being invited to a party because I was in this band. So I moved to Toronto, where there were a lot more choices at the time.”
Read the complete original article on www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/…/
